厄勒克特拉

Many years have passed since then. Electra has perforce continued to live under the same roof with the murderers. While her sisters, Chrysot/iemis and Iphianassa, have been taught by prudetice to hide their feelings, she has made no concealment of her loyalty to her father's memory, or of her inconsolable grief. Every kind of hardship and of insult is her portion at the hands of her mother and the dastardly Aegisthus ; no slave could fare worse than she does in the house that was her father s. Clytaemnestra's hatred has been embittered, from ti?ne to time, by some false rumour as to the return of Orestes, — the one terror that still haunts the guilty pair. Meanwhile Electra herself, worn out with misery and with waiting, has begun to falter in the one hope which has hitherto borne her up, — that the brother from whom she parted so long ago would be sent back by the gods as an avenger. It is morning, the new-risen sun is bright and the birds are singing, as the old man, accompanied by two youths, arrives on the high ground in front of the palace at Mycenae. ELECTRA, Paedagogus. Son of him who led our hosts at Troy of old, son of Agamemnon ! — now thou mayest behold with thine eyes all that thy soul hath desired so, long. There is the' ancient Argos of thy yearning, — that hallowed scene whence the gad-fly drove the daughter of Inachus ; and there, Orestes, is the Lycean Agora, named from the wolf-slaying god ; there, on the left, Hera's famous temple ; and in this place to which we have come, deem that thou seest Mycenae rich in gold, with the house of the Pelopidae there, so often stained with bloodshed ; 10 whence I carried thee of yore, from the slaying of thy father, as thy kinswoman,…